Abstract
Sterile neutrinos are well-motivated and simple dark matter (DM) candidates. However, sterile neutrino DM produced through oscillations by the Dodelson-Widrow mechanism is excluded by current X-ray observations and bounds from structure formation. One minimal extension, that preserves the attractive features of this scenario, is self-interactions among sterile neutrinos. In this work, we analyze how sterile neutrino self-interactions mediated by a scalar affect the production of keV sterile neutrinos for a wide range of mediator masses. We find four distinct regimes of production characterized by different phenomena, including partial thermalization for low and intermediate masses and resonant production for heavier mediators. We show that significant new regions of parameter space become available which provide a target for future observations.
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Acknowledgments
The work of MD and SV has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the Individual Research Grant 496940663 and the Research Training Group (RTG) 2044.
We thank P. F. Depta for his comments and for raising a concern that made us realize an issue with our original numerical implementation in the limit where the temperature of the steriles differs substantially from the one of the actives.
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Astros, M.D., Vogl, S. Boosting the production of sterile neutrino dark matter with self-interactions. J. High Energ. Phys. 2024, 32 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2024)032
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/JHEP03(2024)032